Home grown tomatoes taste so much better than the supermarket tomatoes and they are easy to grow in any garden as long as its in a warm sheltered spot. They can be grown indoors, a greenhouse, containers and hanging baskets, or outdoors so it’s important to choose the correct variety for where you want to grow them.

Sowing
Fill a 3 inch pot with compost and scatter the tomato seeds thinly and cover with a thin layer of compost. Give them a good watering and leave somewhere warm until they germinate. When they are big enough to handle transfer them to individual posts. When the first truss appears they are ready to be planted into either a grow bag or their final position. For plants grown in a grow bag, insert a cane next to the plant and tie the tomato plant to the cane every 4-6 inches.

Looks after the tomato plant
Unless you are growing a bush variety, try and keep the plant as a single stem by pinching out shoots at the leaf joints. When you’ve got 4-5 flowering trusses, pinch out the top to stop the plant from growing and to put all its energy in producing fruit. Keep the plant well watered and feed with tomato fertiliser every week.

Green Tomatoes
If you’ve got a glut of green tomatoes at the end of the season, try putting them in a paper bag with a banana to try and ripen them, or you could make green tomato chutney which tastes amazing and will keep until the following year.